October 04, 2011

Download Ten Secs of Every Hit Song of the '60s

Here we are, reading the first sentence of the second installment of a column where I'll give you a chartsweep of every hit song from 1956 to 1997. If you're wondering where this all comes from, I applied a shell script I wrote (that finds the maximum amplitude of an mp3 and cuts 10 seconds from that point) to one of the great treasures of WFMU's music library - that magical folder of mp3s called "Top 100 By Year". For this week, I will not wax philosophical on why I find these cutups so beautiful...they speak for themselves!

Also, check out these related bits of compilation/traversal art! Listener Fred sent me a video of Noe Soulier perform several dance pieces - among them are every ballet step in alphabetical order and (!!!) an exerpt from every 19th century ballet taken in chronological order. Fred also sent me a link to a Max/MSP patch called CataRT, which cuts up sound into tiny "grains", graphs them, and allows you to reconfigure those "grains" creatively. In the comments to my last post, listener Robert showed me his awesome blog that makes a statistical analysis of the most popular keys of pop songs throughout the decades. One major work that I should also mention is R Luke Dubois' piece Billboard, which finds the spectral "average" of every #1 billboard song and then plays each distilled hit in chronological order.

If you like all this nonsense, please support my radio show. Follow this link to my playlist where you can make a pledge to WFMU, which misguidedly allows me to cutup and reconfigure pop shlock for the entertainment of nincompoops such as yourself!

Find the complete tracklist of these songs below the fold!

keep in mind that my patch occassionally messes up, so some of the tracks listed may be missing from the cutups...

Comments

WLS 89 AM in Chicago had a montage like this back in the early 1970s and I distinctly remember John Records Landecker playing it on his show. That initial sampling got me interested in making my own from tapes over the years. The best I ever compiled was a 30 minute montage of everything George Jones recorded: each song snippet lasting between 5 and 15 seconds. It sounds amazing and shows his catalog very nicely.

I like this genre as it brings back so many memories of long forgotten music and artists. I only wish that your shell script had recorded until the next musical lull and phased the songs together in a dovetail fade. The script you used had awkward cuts due to the ten second parameter you established and it cur off words in the middle. Try fading the songs in and out on top of each other and be more liberal with the "10 seconds" and you'll have something truly memorable.

And Bill C, yes, there was an old radio show called the History of Rock And Roll that originated the chartsweep concept to my knowledge. Unfortunately, shell scripts are stupid and don't know how to keep from cutting words off, but I'll look into crossfading the samples. I'm working on learning Python so I can improve my code in a lot of different ways.